Morning Jay: Is Gallup Biased Against Obama?

Jay Cost

Over the weekend, Mark Blumenthal of the Huffington Postpublished a lengthy review of the Gallup poll’s methodology. It is a technical read, but I encourage you to give it a careful look.

Blumenthal’s bottom line is that Gallup tends to place the president’s job approval rating about 2.5 points below the average of similar polls, and that a portion of this can be chalked up to under-sampling non-whites.

What to make of this? I have five points to offer.

1. Blumenthal’s technical analysis appears sound. Basically, there are a series of difficult choices that need to be made about how to sample non-white adults. Blumenthal argues that the sum of Gallup’s choices results in fewer non-whites being sampled than in other polls, according to the most up-to-date demographic information about America. This is a persuasive point.

2. Gallup hasn’t done anything wrong. This is where I start to diverge from Blumenthal. To be clear, he does not accuse Gallup of doing anything unethical. Instead, his argument is that Gallup’s choices are methodologically inappropriate.

The problem is that Blumenthal looks at Gallup in isolation.

Think of it this way: Suppose that I am asked to describe my cat, Popper, to somebody who has never met another cat before. I tell him that she is very stuck up; she acts as if the world revolves around her; she gets in fights all the time, in particular with her younger sisters; and generally behaves as though I am her pet, not vice-versa. That person might conclude that Popper is a bad cat, but she is in fact typical of the species. Because I only discussed one cat, without noting how cats in general are prickly and self-involved, I gave the false sense that Popper is somehow worse than others.

And so it goes with Blumenthal’s analysis. Yes, Gallup is making decisions about how to sample, and these decisions create a “house effect,” which in this case cuts against the president. However, house effects are endemic to polling. It is an inexact science, and every pollster must make trade-offs similar to what Gallup is doing. Some pollsters make choices that cut against this president; others make choices that cut in his favor.

The onlyfair way to criticize Gallup for its choices is to examine them in relation to other pollsters: why did Gallup make one choice that another pollster did not, what effect did these different choices have on the final result, and whose decision is more defensible? Yes, Gallup is undersampling nonwhites, but maybe achieving a proper balance among nonwhites creates imbalances in other aspects of the poll, which Gallup judged to be more harmful to its accuracy. Blumenthal cannot address this (very reasonable) possibility because he has not looked at other polls.

3. Other polls have similar issues. Blumenthal compares the Gallup poll to Pew, using the latter as a baseline. However, he fails to note that Pew has a “house effect” that is roughly as substantial as Gallup’s.

Specifically, consider the following graph, which I created by using Pollster’s superb polling widget. The black and red lines track President Obama’s job approval and disapproval since 2010 among the major media polls of adults, conducted via live interviews. The dots are Pew’s disapproval numbers.

As we can see, Pew systematically underestimates Obama’s disapproval rating relative to the other polls.

Why is this? Quite possibly, it relates to my previous point: Pew is confronting the same difficult challenges that Gallup is facing, making different decisions on how to deal with them, and thus arriving at a different result.

4. It is misleading to single out Gallup. In my years of watching polls, I’ve concluded that all pollsters fall into one of three categories:

(a) Hacks. These pollsters skew their numbers to score some political point.

(b) Incompetents. These pollsters may or may not have an agenda, but they are just bad at what they do.

(c) Competent, honest brokers. These pollsters know what they are doing, and put in a good faith effort to be fair.

I’m not interested in assigning pollsters to different groups today, but I will say that Gallup definitely falls into category (c). I am guessing Blumenthal would agree; indeed, the only reason he was able to conduct this analysis is because Gallup is so open about its methods, which really sets it apart from many.

By failing to note the broader context, Blumenthal’s conclusions paint Gallup in an unfairly negative light, potentially causing non-technical readers to dismiss it wrongly as hacky or incompetent.

5. All of this misses a much bigger point. Blumenthal’s criticism of Gallup is directed at its poll of adults, and specifically for having white adults comprise roughly 71 percent of its poll rather than roughly 68 percent. But what is not mentioned is that whites make up a larger share of the electorate than 68 or even 71 percent.

Even in 2008, when Obama generated a 27 percent increase in the black vote, whites still accounted for 74 percent of all voters. This means that, when it comes to measuring the electoral relevance of Obama’s job approval rating, the Gallup poll is still “skewed” toward the Democrats. It just happens to be less “skewed” than other polls.

There is a broad consensus among the major pollsters to focus on the political opinions of adults. This is a perfectly defensible choice, as the attitude of all adults is sociologically interesting, but it can lead to serious problems when one is trying to draw conclusions about an upcoming election. A significant portion of respondents in all-adult polls is not going to vote, and these non-voters generally prefer Democrats to Republicans. Thus, polls of all adults tend to overstate the Democratic position vis-à-vis the upcoming election. (And yes, even Gallup’s poll of adults does this.)

Blumenthal’s argument is poorly served by failing to mention this context. It is more than a little strange to call out Gallup for being too "anti-Obama" when in fact all polls of adults, including Gallup's, tend to be too "pro-Obama." At the very least, it is appropriate to mention that all-adult polls tend to be too bullish on Democratic electoral prospects.

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In conclusion, Blumenthal has completed a carefully researched, persuasive technical study of the assumptions that Gallup makes when it polls the population, and how those assumptions create an anti-Obama house effect. Yet by failing to take in the broader context, his analysis winds up being more prejudicial than probative, giving a false sense that Gallup does not deserve its sterling reputation.

Gallup is not above criticism, but it is nevertheless a fine pollster that is trying to get things right, and Blumenthal offers no practical basis to evaluate whether its methodological assumptions are unreasonable. He would have been better served by applying this same rigorous method to multiple polls at once, thus enabling us to judge Gallup in relation to other pollsters, rather than some ideal that nobody practically attains.